Alpha Institute for Advanced Studies (AIAS)

Some Misconceptions in Relativity Theory

1. It was not developed solely by Einstein, in fact the idea of length contraction was put forward by G. F. Fitzgerald in 1892. The idea that physics is objective goes back to the ancient Greeks, who regarded geometry as a form of beauty.

2. Several people derived the Lorentz transformation.Lorentz's work in 1899 is the most definitive.

3. Several people derived the formula E = mc2, the first being Poincare, not Einstein. (It is also worth noting that it was Isaac Newton who first suggested the interchange of light and ponderable matter: "Gross bodies and light are convertible into one another...")

4. Poincare was the first to derive a principle of relativity. Einstein's work of 1905 is important, but by no means unique.

5. It is now known that the Einstein Hilbert field equation violates the Bianchi identity of geometry due to the EH equation's neglect of torsion. So the EH equation is irretrievably incorrect. In fact this has been known for ninety years. Among those who have severely criticised this equation is Erwin Schroedinger (1918).

6. The metric attributed to Schwarzschild was not derived by Schwarzschild in 1916, who did not use 2MG / c squared. He used an undetermined parameter alpha.

7. The class of vacuum solutions of the Einstein field equation is unphysical, it contains no energy / momentum density, and violates the Einstein equivalence principle. It cannot describe interaction between masses. All solutions of EH that contain finite energy / momentum density violate the Bianchi identity and are incorrect mathematically. These include all the metrics currently used in cosmology.

8. Orbits are due to the spherical symmetry of space-time, and not to the EH field equation.

9. Eddington did not prove the EH equation in his experiments, he did not have anywhere near the precision to do so.

10. There have been numerous criticisms of the EH equation for ninety years. A small group of contemporary proponents of big bang ignore all these criticisms. So these proponents are pseudo-scientists.

11. There are many data against big bang, which cannot be a physically meaningful phenomenon because it is derived from the incorrect EH equation. Similarly black holes, dark matter and so on are unphysical concepts.

12. There cannot be a unified field theory if its gravitational sector adheres to the EH equation. To date, ECE is a satisfactory unified field theory based on the Cartan structure equations and the Bianchi identity. There are other routes to a unified field theory based on generalizations of the Cartan geometry.